Virgin Mobile TNT

[ music ] >> Hi, I'm Kent German, senior editor here at CNET.com. Today we're gonna take a first look at the Virgin Mobile TNT. This is a brand new phone from Virgin Mobile. Virgin Mobile calls it a dynamite little flip phone, I'm not sure I'd go that far. But it is a basic phone for making calls, sending messages, it has voice dialing as well. So reliable, and it just does what it needs to do, but not exactly the most exciting phone out there. Pretty simple design as well, just a little angular and boxy. It is a lot of straight lines, and rounded corners just a bit. But not a whole lot of style going on here. The only things I did like is the blue color, it's just a nice change, and it has the soft touch material on the outside. So that gives a phone a nice feeling in the hand, it feels solid. The hinge, which is silver here, is very sturdy especially. Sometimes in the real basic flip phones you do get a little bit of flimsy construction, but not here. The external display is very small, it's very retro, rectangular, they have a lot of wasted space here I thought. Overall, it could be a little larger, the text is small. You do want to check this out if you have any visual impairments. Does show the date and time and battery life and everything, but again it is really small and it is monochrome. Tiny little speaker down here, here on the side we have a volume rocker, 2.5 millimeter headset jack, and on this side there's a micro USB slot they use for the charger. Open up the phone, inside a sixty five thousand color display, not the brightest, not the best resolution out there. But you know, it is fine for this caliber of phone, this is such a basic phone for making calls that we're not gonna go too overboard at demanding a really great screen. [inaudible] based, you can scroll through them easily, and I had no problems there. Keypad buttons and navigation controls pretty well designed. They are flat with the surface of the phone, there are very thin ridges between some of the keys, gives it the slightest bit of tactile definition. But this isn't a great phone for dialing by feel, that was a problem. The keys are spacious though, and they're not too slippery, so we didn't have any [inaudible] problems in this dials, which is nice. So overall not a bad phone. Has a low range feature set with messaging, a few organized features, has the voice dialing. But not a whole lot going on here, really just about making calls and sending messages. And on that front it does pretty well. I'm Kent German, and this is the Virgin Mobile TNT. ^M00:02:04 [ music ]